


Homemade Coffee

by thegirlnamedcove



Category: The X-Files
Genre: But whatever, Demons, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Little drabble that i want to add to, Period-Typical Homophobia, Tags to be added as i expand, that feels so weird to type considering i'm talking about the 90s
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2018-12-21 09:11:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11940948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlnamedcove/pseuds/thegirlnamedcove
Summary: “How was your day?” Grace asks, “Catch any bad guys?”Scully shakes her head and smiles, “Only weird guys.”





	1. Chapter 1

It’s the end of the day in the X Files basement office. Mulder is still poring over a series of phone records from a pizzeria in Hattiesburg, Mississippi that he thinks is infested with demons, and it looks like he won’t be stopping any time soon.

Scully makes him some coffee and sets the cup on his desk. He murmurs an acknowledgement but doesn’t touch it. She puts on her coat and leaves.

The road home is short, she only lives a few miles north of the office in a set of newer townhouses. The dahlias out front are finally blooming after a hard battle against the wet local weather, but admittedly she wasn’t the one waging it. She returned from a business trip one weekend to find them finally there, lush and red. They’re lovely and she picks one, knowing she’ll be scolded.

Inside she hangs up her jacket, and shouts “two seconds!” before ascending the stairs to change out of her suit and contacts. The big frame glasses and worn out volleyball jersey make her look far less imposing, but she doesn’t need to compensate for her small stature here.

When she gets down to the kitchen her girlfriend is finishing up a garlic parmesan pasta, and Scully presses a kiss to the crown of her head before moving to the fridge to pour wine out of a box and into a floral patterned mug.

“How was your day?” Grace asks, “Catch any bad guys?”

Scully shakes her head and smiles, “Only weird guys.”

“Christmas is coming up,” her voice is light but leading, “Most offices have parties at Christmas.”

“Not my office.”

Grace pouts and hooks a finger in the V of Scully’s jersey. She pulls her close and tucks her nose under her jawline where it’s both thrilling and incredibly ticklish. Scully squirms away and lets out an undignified squawk.

“When you gonna let me meet the people you work with Dana? You said they’re open minded. You ashamed of me, huh?”

“Never, Gracie. I’m more proud of landing you than anything else I’ve accomplished. But what I do for a living is…well, it’s nothing I want to mix with what we’ve got here.”

Grace huffs but accepts the redirect and murmers a thanks against her cheek. She breaks apart and portions the pasta onto plates. The townhouse is quiet besides the sound of sprinklers and a distant barbecue floating in the open window above the sink.


	2. Chapter 2

The curtains Grace had picked out, thin and gauzy and peach, did nothing to keep the morning sun out of their bedroom. For the thousandth morning since she'd brought them home Dana opened her eyes to blinding white sunshine and contemplated covering the goddamn window with duct tape. Inevitably, though, her eyes adjusted and the room filtered back into view and there, pillowed on Dana's breast and hair fanned across her cheek, was Grace--round in the cheeks with a little extra weight, flushed with sleep, a stray curl twisted into her mouth, like a renaissance painting of a woman--and Dana knew she'd leave the peach curtains alone.

She carded her fingers through Grace’s hair, letting it catch against her nails where they were getting a bit too long. She came awake in stages and by the time she was blinking her eyes open the sun was above the gutters outside and the room was more tolerable.

“Morning, sugar,” she said, voice thick, “I dreamed about you.”

“Yeah?” Dana smiled.

“Mm-hmm. Dreamed you were a big carp, floating around in our garden fountain. You told me my eyebrows were ugly.”

She snorted and scratched at Grace’s scalp, letting her eyes fall closed.

“You have time for breakfast today? I’ll be heading out of town soon, I want to get as much of you as I can before I do.”

Grace lifted her head, puzzled, and her face drew into a frown.

“You don’t have any business trips planned. I know your work takes you away a lot, but they’re supposed to give you warning, right?”

“It’s nothing official yet, I just have a feeling. My partner has been real persistent about researching this Hatiesburg case and he just...has that gleam in his eye.”

Grace sat up fully the, squaring her shoulders and letting the sheets pool around her hips.

“Alright then. You’ll just have to take me with you.”

Dana snapped her eyes up from where they’d lingered on Grace’s breasts, and her brows drew together.

“What?”

“You simply can’t go without my cooking this often, you’ll die of scurvy. You’ll have to take me with you,” she nodded, decisively.

“I don’t think tater tot casserole helps scurvy, Gracie. For that you’d need to cook actual fruit and vegetables,” Grace swatted at Dana’s stomach, but she kept on, “And there’s not exactly protocol for bringing family on work trips. Even if Uncle Sam counted relationships like ours as family.”

She shrugged, “Then make up some protocol. Or I can just  _ happen _ to be in Hattiesburg at the same time, we can even take separate flights if you think we need to be that stealthy. I want to spend time with you Dana, I want us to work. You’re away so often that I’ve started sleeping in the center of the bed, like when I lived alone, and it’s just not sustainable.”

“I’m sorry,” Dana started, before her girlfriend cut her off.

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault, I know what the FBI is like. I just mean that we need to make an effort to be together. I have family near there, anyway, so we have a built in excuse and I’ll have things to do while you’re working. I’m not demanding all your time. I just want to be there when you wake up, maybe the occasional lunch date, and at least one embarrassing touristy photo for the album. That’s all.”

Dana caught herself smiling and tried fruitlessly to tamp it down. The album was Grace’s most guarded  prize, sitting on their mantle like a guest of honor, the cover real leather. There was a picture near the front of the two of them at Disneyworld. They’d gotten a wild hare while Dana was still at Quantico and hopped on the first flight that would take them. They had to tell the ticket booth they were friends, a gaudy gold cross around her neck, but after that it had been amazing. The picture was outside Cinderella’s castle, both of them wearing Minnie Mouse ears, and Grace wearing Dana’s old debate team shirt despite how it rode up and showed off her midriff.

After that first trip, more had followed, each documented with its own packet of prints from Walgreens. A photo of them having a two person Thanksgiving at their little breakfast bar. A photo of them lounging by an above ground pool drinking pureed watermelon and rum. A photo of them at the lawyer’s the day they signed  a palimony agreement. Grace had written “just married” across the front of that one in silver sharpie, although Dana still insisted she intended to marry Grace properly , if not legally, once work settled down and they had the time. Only what if she was right? What if they never got the time? What if the X Files, as a department, was never wrapped up neat and tidy like her bosses had implied when they assigned it to her?

“Okay,” she said finally, “Book the flight. This Friday, I’m sure as soon as I suggest it Mulder will jump to attention.”

Grace grinned, bright and blinding, and pressed a kiss to Dana’s forehead.

“Thank you, sugar.”

“You know, it’s very unfair of you to lure me into a discussion with your tits out like this.”

“I use what God gave me,” she shrugged, and pushed into Dana’s space until she had no choice but to brace her hands against the soft flesh of her hips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been like three months since I posted the first chapter and here I am with a pretty short second chapter. You should consider this indicative of how the schedule will be going forward. I have no idea how long this will be in the end or how often I'll add to it. I'll try to resolve any cliffhangers on a prompt timeline, though, not doing that would just be mean.


	3. Chapter 3

Mulder was a nightmare on the plane. Grace had taken a different flight on a different airline as promised, and Dana had passed the time at takeoff wondering if they’d see each other in the sky, as unlikely as that was. As soon as they were aloft though, and free to move around the cabin, her partner was a study in perpetual motion and she didn’t have a chance to even look out the window. He was always scribbling something in his notebook or rearranging something in his bag or pressing the buttons above their head like he expected them to do something different besides turn on the cold air and summon the stewardess.

“Tell me about the demons,” she snapped finally, desperate to find something that would keep his mind busy, “Run it by me again. I need to know the details if we want to hit the ground running.”

“Right,” he snapped his fingers and fished his notes from his breast pocket, “Okay, so there’s a little pizza place on the outer edge of Hattiesburg, Mississippi--mostly makes its money by being willing to deliver to the boonies--but a little while ago the owner suddenly wins the lottery.”

Dana frowned.

“So?”

“So, Mississippi doesn’t have a lottery. It was a Kentucky ticket, which he claims to have found blown into a gutter outside his building. Drove four hours to claim it, it was in all the papers just for the dumb luck of it. Then, a few days later, there’s a letter to the editor in the Hattiesburg Press talking about horned figures around 38th street, just a block from the pizza joint. A day after that there’s this huge electrical storm, totally out of season. Then a week after that,” he flips a few pages ahead to a crude sketch of a slender, malnourished cat, “All the animals in town start dying. It looks like starvation, and the police chief took a paragraph in the blotter to talk about the evils of animal cruelty, but it’s happening all over and all at once.”

He sat back, a satisfied look on his face, and shoved the notebook back into his coat. Dana raised an eyebrow in a vague play at scorn, but admittedly she didn’t turn back to the Tom Clancy novel she’d abandoned earlier.

“Sounds circumstantial to me. A whole lot of other explanations.”

“Yeah, but you know there’s something there. I mean the pattern is uncanny when you think about that file I had you go through last month. If I’m right we even have some idea of  _ which _ demon it is, since he’s struck before.”

Dana cringed and fell back against her seat.

“Behemoth.”

“Exactly.”

The plane jostled then, hitting a pocket of turbulence and throwing them both forward. Dana kept her grip on the armrests but Fox slammed his head into the plastic back of the seat in front of them, and she grimaced in sympathy.

“He’s a chaos demon?”

Fox rubbed his forehead and returned her wincing scowl, “Unfortunately.”

 

***

 

The pizzeria owner was singularly unhelpful when they turned up at his register. He’d been visited, he said, by a number of debt collectors and supposed distant relatives all looking to scratch out a piece of his winnings, and their badges weren’t about to fool his keen mind.

“I could make that shit at kinkos. Buddy of mine went to college for graphic artistry and he’s real good, could whip up anything you want in an hour.”

He shoved the billfold holding Mulder’s badge back across the counter and folded his arms over his chest.

“If you want to have your superior call me and tell me his badge number, I might listen. But I am not saying anything to some stranger in a trenchcoat who wanders on in here like he’s king of shit mountain.”

Mulder hesitated, hand still halfway in the air from when he’d set down the badge moments before. Scully knew he’d reboot soon enough, surely with something snarky to say, and she headed it off at the pass.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll respond to a warrant if it comes to that. Until then, have a nice day Mr Hartigan.”

She hooked an arm in Fox’s and headed for the door, gears already turning as she tried to memorize every detail of the store for her report later. She might not believe in half the mumbo jumbo Mulder seemed to, but she knew by now to trust her instinct and keep track of the small stuff.

As they stepped out the door a shiver crawled down her spine and she noted that too before steering Mulder to the rental car they’d parked by the curb.

“I’d like to talk to the local veterinarian next, see how far the effects have progressed since last week, but they closed an hour ago,” Mulder said, and folded himself into the driver’s seat.

Dana hummed, “Nothing for it then. We’ll need out strength anyway. How about we head to the motel by the freeway. The one with the individual cabins?”

“Perfect,” his grin was easy as he cranked the stick shift into reverse, “No one to put in a noise complaint if we’re up late. I figured I’d call around to the local police too and the FBI office in Jackson. You can go through the meteorology reports, look for anything outside the nomal parameters.”

“What, I’m a weather girl now?” A blush crawled up her neck, but she just snorted and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why you insist on running on three hours sleep but I can’t do that kind of schedule. You want to stay up, fine, I’ll get my own cabin next door.”

He met her gaze with a frown of his own but tipped his head in assent, and pulled them onto the onramp to head up towards the Peppertree Inn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I don't dislike Mulder as much as this fic makes it seem, he's just a really good choice of comic relief. And I imagine most serious characters secretly think of the eccentric characters this way.


End file.
